Sean O'Dell
11/10/2003 6:35:00 PM
On Monday 10 November 2003 09:28 am, Gregory Millam wrote:
> Received: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 01:21:15 +0900
>
> And lo, Aredridel wrote:
> > > But, would you implement a game with ruby?
> >
> > MUD, yes, first person shooter? Probably not without coding critical
> > sections in Objective C.
>
> I see no reason Ruby can't be a good gaming platform for even
> graphic-intense games. All it really needs is a /well polished/ game to
> pave the way. Perl has Frozen Bubble. Python has PyDance... etc.
>
> All that is really needed to go beyond that, such as an FPS, is to have a
> compiled C library with the most intense graphics routines - Blitting,
> managing (large) images. With Ruby doing the logic and manipulating a
> compiled game core doing the graphics, I'd probably be willing to pit that
> against Java (which is interpreted bytecode, after all).
There is more to a game than graphics routines. Animations, networking,
movers, etc. are all very time-sensitive. You couldn't really do much of
that in Ruby; not well enough for a game (unless you just wanted to say "hey,
look, it works!"). You could, however, script various components with Ruby
to make different variations of the game, and to handle certain parts of the
game such as menuing and option dialogs. I can see using Ruby where Unreal
Tournament used UnrealScript. But not for a game engine itself.
In that vein, you could say that Unreal Tournament was written in UnrealScript
because the game itself is just a collection of components provided by the
game engine. UnrealScript did the actual work, throwing up options dialogs,
launching games, providing the game actions, etc. The game engine itself was
pretty much incapable of playing a Deathmatch, Assault or Domination game;
UnrealScript did all that.
So: yes and no, I think. =)
Sean O'Dell